Name: To Make Elderberry Beer or Ebulum
Ingredients: 1 hogshead of strong wort; 1 bushel of picked elderberries; hops (for infusion); bruised spices (optional)

Why it works: Wort and hops work together. They rank in the top 49% of all ingredient pairs. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

To Make Elderberry Beer or Ebulum

Ingredients

1 hogshead of strong wort
1 bushel of picked elderberries
hops (for infusion)
bruised spices (optional)

Directions

Prepare the wort

Boil the strong wort with the picked elderberries until fully ripe.
Strain the mixture and let it cool.

Ferment and age

Work the liquor in a hogshead, avoiding open tun or tub.
Add hops for preservation and flavor, and optionally hang a bag of bruised spices in the vessel.
Allow it to sit in the cask for about a year before bottling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Wort + hopstop 49% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together0 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Strong wort: Provides the fermentable sugars and body that the beer is built on.
Picked elderberries: Supply the fruit flavor and color that define this beer.
Hops: Add bitterness and flavor and help preserve the beer.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.